Google is seeing a huge surge in copyright takedown requests

Google is seeing a huge surge in companies asking it to remove
copyrighted material from its search results.

In the last week, copyright holders have submitted more than 21
million requests, an all-time record, and up almost 3x from the
same time last year, as this chart from Statista based on
information from Google shows. These requests mostly come
about when a site blatantly copies or steals content from another
site, and the original copyright owner asks Google to remove
links to the offending site. (These results only include
automated requests from Google's web form, and only for its
search engine, not other Google properties like
YouTube.)

There's no obvious new technology or upswing in copyright
violations to blame for the increase. Rather, it seems that
copyright holders are simply becoming more systematic and
aggressive about pursuing takedown requests under the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).